How to use Asynchronous Servlets to improve performance

October 10, 2013 by Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovski

This post is going to describe a performance optimization technique applicable to a common problem related to modern webapps. Applications nowadays are no longer just passively waiting for browsers to initiate requests, they want to start communication themselves. A typical example would involve chat applications, auction houses etc – the common denominator being the fact that most of the time the connections with the browser are idle and wait for a certain event being triggered.

This type of applications has developed a problem class of their own, especially when facing heavy load. The symptoms include starving threads, suffering user interaction, staleness issues etc.

Based on recent experience with this type of apps under load, I thought it would be a good time to demonstrate a simple solution. After Servlet API 3.0 implementations became mainstream, the solution has become truly simple, standardized and elegant.

But before we jump into demonstrating the solution, we should understand the problem in greater detail. What could be easier for our readers than to explain the problem with the help of some source code:

Upon receiving the event, the response is compiled and sent back to the client

Let me explain this waiting aspect. We have some external event that happens every 2 seconds. When new request from end-user arrives, it has to wait some time between 0 and 2000ms until next event. In order to keep it simple, we have emulated this waiting part with a call to Thread.sleep() for random number of ms between 0 and 2000. So every request waits on average for 1 second.

Now – you might think this is a perfectly normal servlet. In many cases, you would be completely correct – there is nothing wrong with the code until the application faces significant load.

In order to simulate this load I created a fairly simple test with some help from JMeter, where I launched 2,000 threads, each running through 10 iterations of bombarding the application with requests to the /BlockedServlet. Running the test with the deployed servlet on an out-of-the-box Tomcat 7.0.42 I got the following results:

Average response time: 9,324 ms

Minimum response time: 5 ms

Maximum response time: 11,651 ms

Throughput: 193 requests/second

The default Tomcat configuration has got 200 worker threads which, coupled with the fact that the simulated work is replaced with the sleep cycle of average duration of 1000ms, explains nicely the minimum and maximum response times – in each second the 200 threads should be able to complete 200 sleep cycles, 1 second on average each. Adding context switch costs on top of this, the achieved throughput of 193 requests/second is pretty close to our expectations.

The throughput itself would not look too bad for 99.9% of the applications out there. However, looking at the maximum and especially average response times the problem starts to look more serious. Getting the worst case response in 11 seconds instead of the expected 2 seconds is a sure way to annoy your users.

Let us now take a look at an alternative implementation, taking advantage of the Servlet API 3.0 asynchronous support:

This bit of code is a little more complex, so maybe before we start digging into solution details, I can outline that this solution performed ~75x better latency- and ~10x better throughput-wise. Equipped with the knowledge of such results, you should be more motivated to understand what is actually going on in the second example.

The servlet itself looks truly simple. Two facts are worth outlining though, the first of which declares the servlet to support asynchronous method invocations:

@WebServlet(asyncSupported = true, value = "/AsyncServlet")

The second important aspect is hidden in the following line

Work.add(request.startAsync());

in which the whole request processing is delegated to the Work class. The context of the request is stored using an AsyncContext instance holding the request and response that were provided by the container.

Now, the second and more complex class – the Work implemented as ServletContextListener – starts looking simpler. Incoming requests are just queued in the implementation to wait for the notification – this could be an updated bid on the monitored auction or the next message in the group chat that all the requests are waiting for.

Now, the notification arrives every 2 seconds and we have simplified this as just waiting with Thread.sleep(). When it arrives all the blocked tasks in the queue are processed by a single worker thread responsible for compiling and sending the responses. Instead of blocking hundreds of threads to wait behind the external notification, we achieved this in a lot simpler and cleaner way – batching the interest groups together and processing the requests in a single thread.

And the results speak for themselves – the very same test on the very same Tomcat 7.0.42 with default configuration resulted in the following:

Average response time: 265 ms

Minimum response time: 6 ms

Maximum response time: 2,058 ms

Throughput: 1,965 requests/second

The specific case here is small and synthetic, but similar improvements are achievable in the real-world applications.

Now, before you run to rewrite all your servlets to the asynchronous servlets – hold your horses for a minute. The solution works perfectly on a subset of usage cases, such as group chat notifications and auction house price alerts. You will most likely not benefit in the cases where the requests are waiting behind unique database queries being completed. So, as always, I must reiterate my favorite performance-related recommendation – measure everything. Do not guess anything.

But on the occasions when the problem does fit the solution shape, I can only praise it. Besides the now-obvious improvements on throughput and latency, we have elegantly avoided possible thread starvation issues under heavy load.

Another important aspect – the approach to asynchronous request processing is finally standardized. Independent of your favorite Servlet API 3.0 – compliant application server such as Tomcat 7, JBoss 6 or Jetty 8 – you can be sure the approach works. No more wrestling with different Comet implementations or platform-dependent solutions, such as the WeblogicFutureResponseServlet.

Now, if you came with me this far, I can only recommend you to follow us on Twitter. I will keep posting on relevant and interesting tech topics, I promise.

Thank you for your kind words But I still believe that second implementation is absolutely correct. We try to simulate the situation, where some events arrive every 2 seconds, e.g. brokerage info. When it arrives, every waiting request is notified at once, without further delays.

I have modified the blog post to make this clearer. 2 seconds are not the request processing time. It is time between events that requests are waiting for. When event arrives, further processing is very fast.

I still believe that second implementation is absolutely correct. We try to simulate the situation, where some events arrive every 2 seconds, e.g. brokerage info. When it arrives, every waiting request is notified at once, without further delays.

Buy may be our first implementation is not that correct… Right now every request waits for exactly 2 seconds, which is not as it should be… Thanks for pointing this out, I will try to find some time to clarify this.